• Analysis
Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan's senator-elect, once told the Guardian that UK democracy beat America's
Abdul El-Sayed, elected US senator for Michigan in this week's midterms, wrote for the Guardian in 2010 that UK democracy had the upper hand on America's - years before clashing with Sky News' James Matthews in the final hours of his campaign.
'Zero votes': the viral Sky News clash
In the tense final hours before his election as US senator for Michigan in this week's midterms, Abdul El-Sayed had a heated encounter with Sky News journalist James Matthews. The exchange has since travelled far beyond the campaign trail.
- •El-Sayed asked Matthews why he would care to have a conversation with him, and said he would never run for office in the UK.
- •He told Matthews: "You know how many votes I want to get in the UK? Zero. I am never running for office in the UK."
- •He added that he did not care what Matthews thought or asked.
- •The clip of the exchange has been viewed more than 13m times on X.
A Rhodes scholar at a Bethnal Green hustings
The man now declaring zero interest in UK votes once made the opposite case in print. In May 2010, El-Sayed wrote an article for the Guardian under the headline "UK democracy has the upper hand on the US".
At the time he was a 25-year-old doctoral student at Oxford University and a Rhodes scholar. He had just attended a Labour party hustings in Bethnal Green and Bow, east London, to choose a parliamentary candidate, and wrote that the evening left him "just a tad envious" of the British way of doing elections.
He explained his starting point: as an American born, bred and taught in school that American democracy was the greatest in the world, he was initially sceptical of the foreign brand. What he found instead, he wrote, was something else entirely.
What I experienced that evening was a ceremony in communal self-determination that I have yet to see in any federal American electoral institution.
What he praised in British elections
El-Sayed set out several reasons for his envy in the Guardian article.
- •He argued that the smaller size of British constituencies compared with US electoral districts meant minority groups could more easily make their voices heard.
- •More competing parties, he wrote, made elections a community exercise in cohesiveness and solidarity, antithetical to the American electoral climate.
- •He praised the local focus of UK voters, who were not electing a head of state, and joked about the odds of them allowing an American to cast his vote on 6 May.
His Oxford years ran alongside the writing. He returned to the US in 2011 after completing his doctorate in public health, having captained the Oxford lacrosse team against Cambridge - a match in which he received a yellow card.
His last Guardian piece came in January 2011. In it, El-Sayed, son of Egyptian immigrants, challenged Barack Obama over his response to the Arab spring, urging him to support the "freedom fighters" who had risen up against Egypt's Hosni Mubarak. He wrote that when he helped elect Obama as the 44th president of the United States, he believed he was doing a service for his country.
A campaign of racism and Trump attacks
The Michigan race that made him a senator was a rougher affair. El-Sayed's election was one of the standout headlines of Tuesday's poll after a barrage of racism and Islamophobia during the campaign.
Donald Trump mocked El-Sayed's name, called him a "jihadist lunatic" and said the Senate would have to "get a special metal detector for Abdul". The campaign also ended with a parting shot from within his own party: Haley Stevens, the Democrat congresswoman he had narrowly defeated for the nomination, denounced him at the last minute and endorsed his Republican rival.
El-Sayed had his answer after Tuesday's result. After JD Vance swears him in in January, he said, Trump can go on and call him senator.
